At the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art last week, Tricia Middleton was busy angsting over the installation of her pink, blue, imposing and vaguely sinister piece that looks like nothing so much as a hard-candy igloo hatched in the sugar-charged nightmare brought on by consuming far too much of the same.

Its name? Embracing ruin and oblivion is the only way to live now. And when you couple it with the title of the exhibition of which it’s now a part, the sinister side comes into clear focus. Middleton’s piece is among a handful of massive installations here, part of Misled by Nature: Contemporary Art and the Baroque, which opened Saturday, and it serves as a nice exemplar of curatorial intent.

Baroque? No argument here. An elaborate hut shingled with irregular sheaves of wax, Middleton’s structure teems with bits and pieces fastened on with chaotic glee. Wax-dappled roses poke from inside walls, ribbons dangle, dark squibs of fabric ooze from underfoot, tiny figurines wade in a jumble of materials at its base. Amid the candy-coloured chaos, the overarching sense is of impending doom: Something’s about to go wrong here, and fast.

Speaking of gone wrong, the show takes its title from a critique by 17th century art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whose disdain for the enthusiastic larding-on of forms and figures of sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini led him to describe him as “misled by nature.”

Back then, the Baroque, loosely translated, referred to a disarmingly ornate over-doneness at odds with neoclassical elegance — a spiritual affront if there ever was one. That was 400 years ago, but it could just easily have been said in the past decade. The eggheaded austerity of conceptualism, now a good half-century old, is still the radioactive fuel of most contemporary art that could see gestures toward crafty ornateness be dismissed as simplistic.

More recently, not so: Idiosyncratic hand-wrought things tethered to an exuberant materiality are enjoying a renaissance in the rarefied realm of contemporary art — have a look at the recent Venice Biennale, the central exhibition of which was a restrained celebration of exactly that — pushed forward on the global stage by a select few. One of the artists leading that charge is our very own David Altmejd, who is surely the marquee attraction here.

Altmejd, a Montrealer, represented Canada at the 2007 Venice Biennale, and it propelled him, rocket-fuel like, to rapid international acclaim (he missed the opening here, having to be present at a solo show of new work in New York at the same time). In the gallery next to Middleton, is his sculptural installation The Holes, a massive extravaganza of evisceration, decay and chaos underpinned by a tightly controlled, almost delicate sensibility. On a huge plinth occupying almost the entire room, two enormous white-furred humanoids — my guess: Sasquatches, but choose your own phantasm — lie side-by-side, their organs, viscera and entrails categorically removed and displayed all around. They’re lying in a snowy glade, pine trees poking up amid the carnage, with jagged mirrored crystals forming a loose boundary.

For all the viscerality, there’s a dark sense of the ordering of things. Spidery webs of veins and blood vessels take on the appearance of a network of circuitry; organs, like a set of lungs, are set neatly aside. (Altmejd’s not above a little endearing toilet humour, either: the word “rectum” appears, written in cursive script with some kind of glittery goo.)

None of this is for the faint of heart, but the overpowering mystery — are the creatures being dismembered, or assembled? — displays the core inquiry of the longstanding man vs. nature debate: Just who’s in charge here? I can’t give you an answer — and I’d doubt anyone who pretended they could — but an easier question is what this has to do with the curatorial thesis. It’s fair to say that both Middleton and Altmejd exult in a gleeful overdone-ness that someone like Winckelmann would regard as higher perversion than Bernini could ever manage; their determined unnatural manipulations of nature look past the physical world and into the psyche, where humanity’s much more adept at defying the so-called natural than anything earthly (in a world of clear-cuts and oil sands, that’s saying a lot).

So, they fit. I’m not sure I can say the same for the other works in the show. Lee Bul’s giant chandelier cobbled together with steel and copper nets, chains, crystals and glass, is impressive but a tad bloodless for the exploration being poked at here. (The show, which was recently at the Art Gallery of Alberta, is missing a piece by Sarah Sze that might have connected the dots a little better; her huge, precarious structures composed of cast-off minutiae are far more engaging, and far less austere. It was too big to fit here).

Next door, Yinka Shonibare’s sculpture Mr. and Mrs. Andrews Without Their Heads serves as biting post-colonial takeback on a classic 18th century Gainsborough portrait — Shonibare’s figures are headless, yes, but also brown-skinned and decked out in loud-print West African batiks fetishized by colonials — but what it has to do with the other works, I can’t say.

The same is true of Bharti Kher’s impressive tryptich of dark fabric festooned with a constellation of Indian bindis. I suppose it’s Baroque, but it puts me more in the mind of tightly controlled abstract painting — the anti-Baroque if there ever was. It also casts back to Middleton and Altmejd, who embrace, I think, the proto-refute to that heady art about art, in that I’m pretty sure I saw some disembodied, Philip Guston-esque fingers poking out amid their respective carnage. Guston, an Abstract Expressionist at the outset, rejected its insistent purity for a more visceral figurative project, and became an icon because of it.

Like most group shows, you have to stretch mightily to fit everything under the same umbrella, and that’s a pretzel I’m not willing to untwist. To be frank, Misled By Nature seems like nothing so much as an opportunity to show off The Holes, one of the National Gallery’s most prized acquisitions of recent years (its associations and synergies with Middleton’s work are inspired, I should add). That’s not a complaint. The wrapping has only ever been a way to deliver the gift, so like my mother says: Be polite, say thank you. And see for yourself.

Misled by Nature continues at MOCCA to April 6.

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